As part of the SYNBIOSAFE project, we carried out an open electronic conference (e-conference), with the aim to stimulate an open debate on the societal issues of synthetic biology in a proactive way. The e-conference attracted 124 registered participants from 23 different countries and different professional backgrounds, who wrote 182 contributions in six different categories: (I) Ethics; (II) Safety; (III) Security; (IV) IPR; (V) Governance and regulation; (VI) and Public perception. In this paper we discuss the main arguments brought up (...) during the e-conference and provide our conclusions about how the community thinks, and thinks differently on the societal impact of synthetic biology. Finally we conclude that there is a chance for an open discourse on the societal issues of synthetic biology happening, and that the rules to govern such a discourse might be set up much easier and be respected more readily than many would suggest. (shrink)

A large team of well-known Soviet scholars is currently preparing a new textbook in philosophy. We thought it might be useful to acquaint the broad philosophical public with the ideas that guided the authors in writing the textbook, and have included its table of contents, preface, and conclusion. We also, together with the team of authors, are hoping for readers' responses. The book will be published shortly by Politizdat Publishers.

As synthetic biology develops into a promising science and engineering field, we need to have clear ideas and priorities regarding its safety, security, ethical and public dialogue implications. Based on an extensive literature search, interviews with scientists, social scientists, a 4 week long public e-forum, and consultation with several stakeholders from science, industry and civil society organisations, we compiled a list of priority topics regarding societal issues of synthetic biology for the years ahead. The points presented here are intended to (...) encourage all stakeholders to engage in the prioritisation of these issues and to participate in a continuous dialogue, with the ultimate goal of providing a basis for a multi-stakeholder governance in synthetic biology. Here we show possible ways to solve the challenges to synthetic biology in the field of safety, security, ethics and the science-public interface. (shrink)

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, EarlyView.

A civic science curriculum is advocated. We discuss practical mechanisms for (and highlight the possible benefits of) addressing the relationship between scientific knowledge and civic responsibility coextensively with rigorous scientific content. As a strategy, we suggest an in-course treatment of well known (and relevant) historical and contemporary controversies among scientists over science policy or the use of sciences. The scientific content of the course is used to understand the controversy and to inform the debate while allowing students to see the (...) role of scientists in shaping public perceptions of science and the value of scientific inquiry, discoveries and technology in society. The examples of the activism of Linus Pauling, Alfred Nobel and Joseph Rotblat as scientists and engaged citizens are cited. We discuss the role of science professors in informing the social conscience of students and consider ways in which a treatment of the function of science in society may find, coherently, a meaningful space in a science curriculum at the college level. Strategies for helping students to recognize early the crucial contributions that science can make in informing public policy and global governance are discussed. (shrink)

Recent accounts of multiscale modeling investigate ontic and epistemic constraints imposed by relations between component models at varying relative scales (macro, meso, micro). These accounts often focus especially on the role of the meso, or intermediate, relative scale in a multiscale model. We aid this effort by highlighting a novel role for mesoscale models: they can function as a focal point, and rationale, for disagreement between researchers who otherwise share theoretical commitments. We illustrate with a case study in multiscale modeling (...) of insect behavior, arguing that the cognitive map debate in neuroethology research is best understood as a mesoscale disagreement. (shrink)

In 1973, the discipline of ethology came into its own when three of its most prominent practitioners—Konrad Lorenz, Nikolaas Tinbergen, and Karl von Frisch—jointly received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. Historians have shown how Lorenz and Tinbergen were central to the practical and theoretical innovations that came to define ethology as a distinct form of animal behavior research in the twentieth century. Frisch is rarely mentioned in such histories. In this paper, I ask, What is Frisch’s relationship to (...) the discipline of ethology? To answer that question, I examine Tinbergen’s relationship to Frisch’s grey card experiments between Tinbergen’s time as a student at the University of Leiden in the mid 1920s and his 1951 publication of The Study of Instinct. In doing so, I highlight previously neglected affinities between Frisch’s early career research and the program of classical ethology, and I show how Frisch’s research meant different things at different times to Tinbergen and others working in the ethological tradition. (shrink)

In the course of investigating the living world, biologists regularly attribute semantic content to the phenomena they study. In this paper, I examine the case of a contemporary research program studying the navigation behaviors of ants and develop an account of the norms governing researchers’ ascriptions of semantic content in their research practices. The account holds that researchers assign semantic content to behaviors that reliably achieve a difficult goal-directed function, and it also suggests a productive role for attributions of semantic (...) content in the process of animal behavior research. (shrink)

The challenges of higher education can be stressful, anxiety-producing, and sometimes depressing for students. Such negative emotions may influence students’ attitudes toward assessment, such as whether it is perceived as acceptable to engage in plagiarism. However, it is not known whether any impact of negative emotions on attitudes toward plagiarism translate into actual plagiarism behaviours. In two studies conducted at two universities, we examined whether negative emotionality influenced plagiarism behaviour via attitudes, norms, and intentions as predicted by the theory of (...) planned behaviour. In both studies, negative affect predicted plagiarism intentions mediated by perceived norms, and intentions predicted plagiarism behaviour. These findings suggest that students’ negative emotionality is a risk for plagiarism engagement and that higher education institutions should support students’ emotional well-being, especially regarding assessment practices. (shrink)

From the Editors:Such was the topic considered by members of a new discussion club, "The Free Word" [Svobodnoe slovo] , along with specialists from the Institute of Philosophy, USSR Academy of Sciences.

Recently, it has been argued that the phenomenon of direct transfer of intermediate metabolites between adjacent enzymes, also known as metabolic channelling, would not decrease the concentration of those intermediates in the bulk solution. However, this conclusion has been drawn by extrapolation from the results of simulations with a rather restricted set of parameters. We show that, for a number of kinetic cases, the existence of metabolic channelling can decrease the size of the soluble pool of intermediates. When the enzyme(s) (...) downstream of the channel have a catalytic capacity that is large relative to the enzymes upstream of the channel, the decrease of concentration can be substantial (3 orders of magnitude). (shrink)

In this paper, the Executive Head of the Global Compact shares some of his own reflections on the evolution of the Global Compact initiative – United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s voluntary corporate citizenship initiative in the area of human rights, labor, the environment and anti-corruption. Two main themes are addressed. The first considers the Global Compact’s institutional context, examining how such an initiative is even possible in the historically hierarchical and traditionally business-unfriendly UN. The second concerns the voluntary nature of (...) the initiative and how it interacts with regulatory approaches. It explains what the Global Compact has to offer as a voluntary initiative, as well as how it can make a unique and complementary contribution to regulation-backed initiatives. The paper concludes with a brief consideration of what the future holds for the Global Compact. (shrink)

All commentators on these lines make two assumptions about the first clause, that means ‘sitting in judgement’, ‘punishing’, or the like, that the which is its subject as well as that of is the second in a series of two: the subsequent slaying punishes or sits in judgement on the previous; thus the slaying of Cly taemnestra herself will sit in judgement upon that of Agamemnon, just as that had sat in judgement upon the of Iphigenia. Then opinions differ as (...) to whether is to be taken as the object of both verbs, or of one but not the other. (shrink)

A considerable number of areas of bioscience, including gene and drug discovery, metabolic engineering for the biotechnological improvement of organisms, and the processes of natural and directed evolution, are best viewed in terms of a ‘landscape’ representing a large search space of possible solutions or experiments populated by a considerably smaller number of actual solutions that then emerge. This is what makes these problems ‘hard’, but as such these are to be seen as combinatorial optimisation problems that are best attacked (...) by heuristic methods known from that field. Such landscapes, which may also represent or include multiple objectives, are effectively modelled in silico, with modern active learning algorithms such as those based on Darwinian evolution providing guidance, using existing knowledge, as to what is the ‘best’ experiment to do next. An awareness, and the application, of these methods can thereby enhance the scientific discovery process considerably. This analysis fits comfortably with an emerging epistemology that sees scientific reasoning, the search for solutions, and scientific discovery as Bayesian processes. (shrink)

Plagiarism is a problematic issue in universities across the globe (Curtis & Vardanega, 2016 ). This study explored the relationship between negative emotionality and positive attitudes toward plagiarism through the mediation of academic self-efficacy and self-control. Negative emotionality was examined as three components: stress, anxiety, and depression. Self-report surveys were completed by 454 university students to investigate the relationship between negative emotionality and positive attitudes toward plagiarism, as well as the mediating role of academic self-efficacy and self-control in this relationship. (...) The hierarchical multiple regression found that negative emotionality significantly predicted positive attitudes toward plagiarism over and above age and gender (i.e., where male students and younger students were more likely to plagiarise). Furthermore, three mediation analyses showed that academic self-efficacy and self-control mediate the relationship between positive attitudes toward plagiarism and each component of negative emotionality. Considering these results, subsequent research should investigate whether implementing strategies that alleviate stress, anxiety, and depression could increase academic self-efficacy and self-control, which in turn, could then reduce positive attitudes toward plagiarism. (shrink)

The cyclical nature of presidential elections provides regular opportunities for journalists to reflect on patterns in election coverage. This study presents a textual analysis of press criticism o...

Global sourcing largely occurs from so-called emerging markets and developing economies. In these contexts, substantial leverage effects for sustainability in supply chains can be expected by reducing adverse impacts on society and minimising related risks. For this ethical end, an adequate understanding of the respective sourcing contexts is fundamental. This case study of South Africa’s mining sector uses institutional theory and the notion of institutional uncertainty to empirically analyse the challenges associated with establishing social sustainability. The case study research is (...) informed by 39 semi-structured interviews with top management representatives and various state and non-state decision makers in SA. Our findings suggest that sustainability in the institutional field is mainly shaped by the Social and Labour Plan institution, induced by state actors and mining companies’ practices. However, four weakening factors were identified that adversely affect this regulative institution, drive institutional uncertainty and allow for mining companies’ gradual decoupling. Contrastingly, complementing pressures of non-state actors limit institutional uncertainty and push toward mainstreaming the stipulations of the institution. This study contributes to the business ethics literature by providing an in-depth exploration of institutional uncertainty’s drivers and barriers within an upstream SC setting and shedding light on multiple actors’ interplay and relevance in sector-wide sustainability. The findings are condensed into three main propositions as well as an analytical framework as a basis for follow-up research. This case study helps practitioners understand and manage complexity that results from actor plurality and institutional uncertainty in EMDEs. (shrink)

The emergence of synthetic biology holds the potential of a major breakthrough in the life sciences by transforming biology into a predictive science. The dual-use characteristics of similar breakthroughs during the twentieth century have led to the application of benignly intended research in e.g. virology, bacteriology and aerobiology in offensive biological weapons programmes. Against this background the article raises the question whether the precautionary governance of synthetic biology can aid in preventing this techno-science witnessing the same fate? In order to (...) address this question, this paper proceeds in four steps: it firstly introduces the emerging techno-science of synthetic biology and presents some of its potential beneficial applications. It secondly analyses contributions to the bioethical discourse on synthetic biology as well as precautionary reasoning and its application to life science research in general and synthetic biology more specifically. The paper then identifies manifestations of a moderate precautionary principle in the emerging synthetic biology dual-use governance discourse. Using a dual-use governance matrix as heuristic device to analyse some of the proposed measures, it concludes that the identified measures can best be described as “patchwork precaution” and that a more systematic approach to construct a web of dual-use precaution for synthetic biology is needed in order to guard more effectively against the field’s future misuse for harmful applications. (shrink)

Orestes has returned to Argos, . For him to brandish at his father's murderers is natural there, where he is delivering a sort of general manifesto as to his aims, and where the strong word is justified and alleviated by the jingle with juxtaposed . But there is no reason for Orestes to go on insisting on the bloodthirstiness of these aims, and reads oddly in 100, where he is explaining soberly his plan of campaign.

I recently heard a presentation by E. V. Semenov, the director of the Russian State Science Foundation . He said that culturology has not been included in the Foundation's rubrication. There are grants, but there is no rubric, because so far culturology is an extremely fluid area, and very diverse topics are relegated to it. Aleksei Iur'evich [Shemanov] is quite right when he says that "the process of shaping culturology into a special discipline" is still under way. In such conditions, (...) it would be premature to offer any definitions of culturology that claim to be complete. So perhaps it is better to approach the problem of defining culturology by developing its notions and concepts. Therefore, I support the version of the dictionary proposed by its authors, although implementing it will be fairly difficult. As an initial idea, however, it is quite suitable. (shrink)

This study offers gamers’ insights to a worldwide popular loot-box game that is widely associated with gambling: FIFA. Through an ethical lens, this study looks at how gamers perceive loot-box promotions, their enduring attitudes toward the game, as well as the role of gaming addictions. A mixed-method study revealed that while gamers found loot boxes and promotions ethically questionable, gaming addiction is positively correlated with perceived ad ethicality, suggesting coping and possible cognitive dissonance.

Barrett finds lines 1010–15 difficult. He says that ‘hovers between “an heiress as my wife” and “marriage with an heiress”’, that ‘a Greek heiress did not inherit property as her own: it passed not to her but with her, to her husband and ultimately to her children.—In Attic law a widow was never : a man's property went to his legitimate children.

In the United States, hate speech sits at the intersection of ethical and legal debates and has a complex relationship with journalism. The First Amendment provides broad legal protections for hate...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Truth in Tragedy:When are we Entitled to Doubt a Character's Words?A. Maria Van Erp Taalman KipIn Sophocles' Electra 563–76 Electra explains what happened at Aulis. Because Agamemnon had shot a stag in Artemis' grove and boasted of his deed, the goddess demanded the sacrifice of his daughter. If he refused, the Greeks would not be allowed to leave Aulis, either to go home or to sail to Troy. Thus, (...) Electra assures her mother, he was forced to make the sacrifice, "under sore constraint and with sore reluctance" (tr. Jebb, Sophocles ad loc).The same version of the story is found in the Cypria(Davies, Fragmenta 32, 55–63), but Sophocles adds a new detail: the impossibility of going home. This is a significant addition. According to the Cypria, Agamemnon could have renounced the war in order to save Iphigeneia, but this solution was not open to his Sophoclean namesake, since refusal meant the Greeks were doomed to remain at Aulis, more or less as prisoners. In this way, we are given to understand that for Sophocles' Agamemnon there was in effect no alternative. This considerably lessens his guilt, while Clytaemnestra is largely deprived of what might have been a righteous motive for her deed. The other motive, her adulterous love, now carries all the weight. But is what Electra says true? Or, to be more precise: are the audience meant to accept her information as true?A number of scholars have answered this question in the negative and it may be useful to begin by examining their arguments. In his article with the telling title "A Defence of Sophocles" J. T. Sheppard asks: "What if the story... were false? 'They tell me...,' she says (566). But what if it were not true? What if Agamemnon was a criminal?" (7). J. H. Kells (Electra), in his general introduction to 566–633, ridicules the whole story as recounted by Electra: "This was the popular belief as to how such unpleasantnesses as Ajax's madness and the Greeks' detention at Aulis came about. But did Sophocles expect an intelligent person to believe it? I do not think so, since in Ajax, in which such causes of Ajax's madness are ventilated, we are also given a behind–the–scenes picture [End Page 517] of the goddess concerned in action (Ajax 1–133), and there we see that the madness of Ajax was in fact inspired by no such divine jealousy: it was simply to prevent Ajax from killing the Greek leaders (51)—an aim which he conceived through no divine infatuation, but because he was angry over the bestowal of the arms of Achilles (41)."Kells' comment on 573 is also noteworthy: : did any intelligent Greek really believe this?" and on 566ff: " 'as I am told.' Does not she know why her father sacrificed her sister?" In the same vein R. P. Winnington–Ingram (Sophocles 220) says that "Electra's account of Aulis, admittedly second–hand ( 566), is the story she would like to believe; and we can hardly suppose that Sophocles wishes us to take it too seriously as an explanation of events." In a note he refers to Kells and adds: "If Sophocles had been concerned to give a serious account of Agamemnon's dilemma, he would hardly have trivialized it in the way he does. The fact remains that Agamemnon did kill his daughter."1On closer inspection, these arguments are not actually arguments at all. Both Kells and Winnington–Ingram appear to be very certain about Sophocles' intentions and expectations, but neither of them presents any convincing reason to disbelieve Electra's account. Sophocles does not give them what they want and therefore they assume that he is not serious. Winnington–Ingram may consider Agamemnon's dilemma trivial, but it makes no sense to say that Sophocles trivialized it, as if it were something real that existed outside of myth. For the purpose of this play, the reason for Artemis' demand was not relevant, but the sanction was. And what about Kells' rhetorical questions? He does not explain why an "intelligent person" or an "intelligent Greek" would disbelieve what Electra says. Because it is... (shrink)

Creatures living under the rule of domestication form a communicative union based on shared morphological, behavioural, cognitive, and immunological resemblances. Domestic animals live under particular conditions that substantially differ from the original settings of their wild relatives. Here we focus on the fact that many parallel characters have appeared in various domestic forms that had been selected for different purposes. These characters are often unique for domestic animals and do not exist in wild forms. We argue that parallel similarities appear (...) in different groups in response to their interaction with the umwelt of a particular host. In zoosemiotic sense, the process of domestication represents a kind of interaction in which both sides are affected and eventually transformed in such a way that one is more integrated with the other than in the time of initial encounter. (shrink)

Lehet-e filozófiai értelemben beszélni a betegségről? Lényegében ezt a kérdést járja körbe a kolozsvári egyetemi tanár könyve. Király V. István szerint ezt az explicit filozófiai diskurzusban igencsak elhanyagolt témát, nem ellentéte, - a filozófus számára sokkal ismerősebb - egészség viszonyában, hanem önmagában sui generis kell megragadni. A betegség alapvető létmódja a lehetőség, hiszen miden ember és élőlény - lényegénél és léténél fogva - megbetegedhet. Az arisztotelészi lehetőség (dynamis) fogalma pedig a szabadsághoz vezet el, így a betegségről való meditáció - hasonlóan (...) a halálról való elmélkedéshez (a szerzőtől ld.: Halandóan lakozik szabadságában az ember) - az emberi egzisztencia megértéséhez visz közelebb. A kiadvány érdekessége, hogy egy igen bőséges, mintegy ötven oldalra rugó angol összefoglalás kíséri. A heideggeri létfilozófia által inspirált, igen eredeti, de a filozófiában kevéssé járatosak számára is befogadható, gondolatébresztő mű. (shrink)

At the UN, important projects laying down transnational corporations' (TNCs) human rights responsibilities have been launched without ever clarifying the relevant theoretical foundations. One of the consequences is that the human rights principles in projects like the 2000 UN Global Compact and the 2003 Norms on the Responsibilities of Transnational Corporations and Other Business Enterprises with Regard to Human Rights can be understood in different ways, which should not cause surprise given that their authors come from diverse backgrounds, including economics (...) and public policy. An examination of these projects and the views of their authors reveals that, although they are superficially linked to international human rights law, they go well beyond it and attempt to deal with corporate social responsibility issues in ways that elude neat classification as fitting neatly in either legal or non-legal categories. Too little attention has been paid to how in the course of developing these projects the legal and ethical dimensions have become entwined and how lines have gotten blurred. Meanwhile, there has been recognition that these UN projects have emerged simply as ad hoc responses to practical concerns about the sustainability of globalization. The lack of any foundational theory or normative framework should be addressed; it is time to bring together specialists from different fields concerned with the human rights responsibilities of corporations to see if it is possible to define a coherent overarching theory for these UN projects. (shrink)

This is a short, critical introduction to Cohen's book and argument: that socialism is justified on several grounds contrary to common opinion. I present Cohen's arguments together with some potential problems as well as responses to them.

Following a usage-based approach to language acquisition, lexically specific patterns are considered to be important building blocks for language productivity and feature heavily both in child-directed speech and in the early speech of children (Arnon, Inbal & Morten H. Christiansen. 2017. The role of multiword building blocks in explaining L1-L2 differences. Topics in Cognitive Science 9(3). 621–636; Tomasello, Michael. 2003. Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press). In order to account for patterns, the traceback (...) method has been widely applied in research on first language acquisition to test the hypothesis that children’s utterances can be accounted for on the basis of a limited inventory of chunks and partially schematic units (Lieven, Elena, Dorothé Salomo & Michael Tomasello. 2009. Two-year-old children’s production of multiword utterances: A usage-based analysis. Cognitive Linguistics 20(3). 481–508). In the current study, we applied the method to code-mixed utterances (n = 1,506) of three German-English bilingual children between 2 and 4 years of age to investigate individual differences in each child’s own inventory of patterns in relation to their input settings. It was shown that units such as I see X as in I see a Kelle ‘I see a trowel’ could be traced back to the child’s own previous productions. More importantly, we see that each child’s inventory of constructions draws heavily on multiword chunks that are strongly dependent on the children’s language input situations. (shrink)

Today, there is a family of celebrated police strategies that teach the importance of cracking down on petty crime and urban nuisance as the key to effective crime control. Under the “broken windows” appellation, this strategy is linked in the public mind with New York City and the alleged successes of its police department in reducing the rate of crime over the past two decades. This paper is critical of such order maintenance approaches to policing: I argue that infringements of (...) civil liberty by such departments could be reduced if the departments looked at law more as a good to be served for its own sake and less as an instrument for the promotion of order. In other words, a shot of legalism is the correct medicine to reduce police misconduct that pierces the law’s protections of citizen freedom. -/- This Article contributes to the critical literature on broken windows policing by reassessing the work of the famous Harvard scholar (James Q. Wilson) who fathered it. The Article takes Wilson’s work and turns it on its head, drawing very different prescriptive conclusions than he did himself. (shrink)

From the diverse work and often competing insights of women's human rights activists, Brooke Ackerly has written a feminist and a universal theory of human rights that bridges the relativists' concerns about universalizing from particulars and the activists' commitment to justice. Unlike universal theories that rely on shared commitments to divine authority or to an 'enlightened' way of reasoning, Ackerly's theory relies on rigorous methodological attention to difference and disagreement. She sets out human rights as at once a research ethic, (...) a tool for criticism of injustice and a call to recognize our obligations to promote justice through our actions. This book will be of great interest to political theorists, feminist and gender studies scholars and researchers of social movements. (shrink)